Cape Town, the port city in South Africa, maybe best known for its scenic beauty, but modern history will always remember it for being the first major city to run out of water. On March 17, 2018, a dangerous, yet well-researched estimate came from an ecologist at Indian Institute of Science that Bengaluru might become India's second major city in the world to run out of water. Why? Because already, when the numbers were being crunched, about ten million residents of Karnataka's capital were already relying on borewells and tankers.
But eerily, it was Chennai that declared Day Zero on June 19, 2019 stating that it had almost no water left. What's more? All of its reservoirs were running dry. This is now referred to as the 2019 Chennai water crisis. Four years ago, Chennai was making headlines for a completely opposite reason though, unprecedented rains causing floods.
As a country, India is collectively going through a water crisis. Here are some scary stats:
- Less than 50 per cent of Indians actually have access to clean drinking water
- Over two-thirds of 718 districts of India are being affected by acute water depletion
- About 1.96 million dwellings have to deal with contaminated water
